19
O n a sweltering day in August 1899, Scott Joplin, a young, black pianist and composer, signed an unusual contract with his music publisher in
Sedalia, Missouri. Instead of receiving an outright payment for his new sheet music composition, “Maple Leaf Rag,” Joplin would earn one cent for every copy sold. At a time when most composers were paid a small fixed fee per composition, the contract signaled a new era in the popular-music industry.
Over the next two decades, “Maple Leaf Rag” would sell more than half a million copies a year and make Joplin the king of ragtime, the popular, syncopated dance music that had become a national sensation.
Scott Joplin’s transformation from unknown saloon piano player to renowned composer sheds light not only on the extraordinary expansion and commercialization of the entertainment industry at the turn of the nineteenth century but also on the class and racial tensions that pervaded popular culture. Although Joplin would publish more than seventy-five songs or piano rags in the next decade and a half, his success was undercut by white competitors who stereotyped his compositions as “Negro music” and “Coon songs.” Joplin, who dreamed of gaining national recognition as an opera composer, remained frustrated by publishers’ refusal to accept his classical compositions. Opera was considered serious music, a high art form controlled by the upper classes; blacks, even those with Joplin’s talent, could not
575

576
C HAPTER 19 Immigration, Urbanization, and Everyday Life, 1860–1900 enter the field. Scott Joplin died in 1917, an admired leader in the entertainment industry whose genius for serious music would not be recognized for another half century. As Joplin’s experience revealed, racial discrimination could reinforce the barriers of social class.
Scott Joplin’s struggle to be accepted was not unusual. Countless others faced similar difficulties in moving up the economic ladder and adjusting to the changes taking place at the turn of the century. American society was slowly shifting from a rural producer economy that stressed work and thrift to an urban consumer economy in which new forms of entertainment, leisure activities, and material possessions were becoming the hallmarks of personal identity.
Nevertheless, Joplin’s success as a ragtime composer mirrored the upward mobility of many Americans who could now enjoy unheard of levels of comfort and convenience. Industrialization had opened up new jobs and destroyed older ones, rearranging the occupational structure, altering the distribution of income within society, and sharpening class divisions. These changes, together with the expansion of white-collar occupations, created new expectations for family life and fostered a growing class awareness.
While the middle and upper classes prospered, immigrants, farmers, and the urban working classes— the overwhelming majority of the population— improved their families’ economic position only slowly and slightly. The growth of consumer products and leisure activities actually widened the gulf between the haves and the have-nots and intensified the sense of class consciousness among rich and poor. Nowhere were these divisions more visible than in the cities teeming with immigrants.
While the very rich lived in a world apart and the middle class embraced its particular behavior code and cultural pursuits, the working class to whom Joplin had first appealed created its own vigorous culture of dance halls, saloons, vaudeville theaters, social clubs, and amusement parks in the bustling cities. Middle-class reformers who strove to remake this working-class culture into their own image of propriety were soon frustrated. In the long run, the culture of the masses would prove more influential in shaping modern America.
This chapter will focus on five major questions:
■ How did the growth of cities and the influx of immigrants create a new awareness of ethnic and class differences? How were racial stereotypes used to reinforce these distinctions?
■ What was Victorian morality, and in what ways did it influence social conventions and patterns of everyday life?
■ How did women’s educational opportunities change in this period, and why did women pioneer new approaches to social welfare?
■ How did the conflict between the working classes and those above them help reshape attitudes toward leisure and recreation at the turn of the century?
■ Why did Americans of different social classes grow disenchanted with Victorian social and intellectual ideals?
E
T
N
A
L
F
C
:
Nowhere were the changes in everyday life more visible than in cities. During the late nineteenth century,
American cities grew spectacularly (see Table 19.1). Not only on the East Coast but also in the South, cities swelled at an astonishing pace. Between 1870 and 1900
New Orleans’s population nearly doubled, Buffalo’s tripled, and Chicago’s increased more than fivefold. By the start of the new century, Philadelphia, New York, and
Chicago all had more than a million residents, and 40 percent of all Americans lived in cities. (In the census, cities were defined as having more than twenty-five hundred inhabitants). In 1900 New York’s 3.4 million inhabitants almost equaled the nation’s entire 1850 urban population.
This spectacular urban growth, fueled by migration from the countryside and the arrival of nearly 11 million foreign immigrants between 1870 and 1900, created a dynamic new environment for economic development.
Mushrooming cities created new jobs and markets that in turn dramatically stimulated national economic expansion. Like the frontier, the city symbolized opportunity for all comers.
The city’s unprecedented scale and diversity threatened traditional expectations about community life and social stability. Rural America had been a place of face-toface personal relations where most people shared the same likes and dislikes. In contrast, the city was a seething caldron where a medley of immigrant groups contended with one another and with native-born Americans for jobs, power, and influence. Moreover, the same rapid growth that energized manufacturing and production strained city services, generated terrible housing and sanitation problems, and accentuated class differences.

Everyday Life in Flux: The New American City
577
T ABLE . 19-1 Urban Growth: 1870-1900
City
Boston
Chicago
Cincinnati
Los Angeles
Milwaukee
New Orleans
New York
Philadelphia
Pittsburgh
Portland
Richmond
San Francisco
Seattle
1870
Population
250,525
298,977
216,239
5,728
74,440
191,418
1,478,103
1,293,697
321,616
90,426
51,038
149,473
1,107
1900
Population
560,892
1,698,575
325,902
102,479
285,315
287,104
3,437,202
647,022
86,075
8,293
85,050
342,782
237,194
Percent
Increase
123.88
468.12
50.71
1,689.08
299.37
49.98
132.54
99.94
273.64
990.38
66.64
129.32
21,326.73
Source: Thirteenth Census of the United States (Washington, D.C.:
U.S. Government Printing Office, 1913).
Native-born city-dwellers complained about the noise, stench, and congestion of this transformed cityscape. They fretted about the newcomers’ squalid tenements, fondness for drink, and strange social customs. When native-born reformers set about cleaning up the city, they sought not only to improve the physical environment but also to destroy the distinctive customs that made immigrant culture different from their own.
The late nineteenth century thus witnessed an intense struggle to control the city and benefit from its economic and cultural potential. The stakes were high, for America was increasingly becoming an urban nation.
The growing concentration of industries in urban settings produced demands for thousands of new workers.
The promise of good wages and a broad range of jobs
(labeled by historians as “pull factors”) drew men and women from the countryside and small towns. So great was the migration from rural areas, especially New
England, that some farm communities vanished from the map.
Young farm women led the exodus to the cities. With the growing mechanization of farming in the late nineteenth century, farming was increasingly male work. At the same time, rising sales of factory-produced goods through mail-order catalogs serving country areas reduced rural needs for women’s labor on subsistence tasks. So young farmwomen flocked to the cities, where they competed for jobs with immigrant, black, and cityborn white women.
From 1860 to 1890, the prospect of a better life also attracted nearly 10 million northern European immigrants to East Coast and midwestern cities, where they joined the more than 4 million who had settled there in the 1840s and 1850s. Germans made up the largest group, numbering close to 3 million, followed by nearly 2 million
English, Scottish, and Welsh immigrants and almost 1.5
million Irish. Moreover, by 1900 more than eight hundred thousand French-Canadians had migrated south to work in the New England mills, and close to a million
Scandinavian newcomers had put down roots in the rich farmlands of Wisconsin and Minnesota. On the West
Coast, despite the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (see
Chapter 18), more than eighty-one thousand Chinese remained in California and nearby states in 1900.

578
C HAPTER 19 Immigration, Urbanization, and Everyday Life, 1860–1900
F IGURE 19.1
The Changing Face of U.S. Immigration, 1865–1920 famine, religious persecution, violence, or industrial depression.
Between 1865 and 1895, the majority of newcomers to America hailed from northern and western Europe. But the early twentieth century witnessed a surge of immigration from southern and eastern Europe.
1,000
900
800
700
600
500
400
300
(Historians call these reasons for immigration “push factors,” since they drove immigrants out of their homelands.) Emigration from
England, for example, spurted during economic downturns in 1873 and 1883. German peasants, squeezed by overpopulation and threatened by church reorganizations that they opposed, left in large numbers in the 1880s.
Many others came voluntarily in search of better opportunities.
More than one hundred thousand
Japanese laborers, for example, were lured to Hawaii in the 1890s to
200
100
0
1865 1870 1875 1880 1885 1890 1895 1900 1905 1910 1915 1920
"Old immigrants" from northern and western Europe
"New immigrants" from southern and eastern Europe work on the lucrative sugar plantations by promises of high wages.
A large number of immigrants were single young men. Birger
Osland, an eighteen-year-old
Norwegian, explained his reasons for leaving to a friend, “as I now probably have a foundation upon
"New immigrants" from Asia, North America, and South America
In the 1890s these “old immigrants” from northern and western Europe were joined by swelling numbers of
“new immigrants”—Italians, Slavs, Greeks, and Jews from southern and eastern Europe, Armenians from the
Middle East, and, in Hawaii, Japanese from Asia (see
Figure 19.1). In the next three decades, these new immigrants, many from peasant backgrounds, would boost
America’s foreign-born population by more than 18 million (see Map 19.1).
The overwhelming majority of immigrants settled in cities in the northeastern and north-central states, with the Irish predominating in New England and the
Germans in the Midwest. The effect of their numbers was staggering. In 1890 New York City (including
Brooklyn, still a legally separate municipality) contained twice as many Irish as Dublin, as many Germans as
Hamburg, half as many Italians as Naples, and 2 1/2 times the Jewish population of Warsaw. That same year four out of five people living in New York had been born abroad or were children of foreign-born parents.
Some recent immigrants had been forced out of their home countries by overpopulation, crop failure, which I can build my own further education, I have come to feel that the most sensible thing I can do is to emigrate to America.” Although significant numbers of young men remained in the United States after they had become successful, large numbers, especially
Italians and Chinese, returned home as well.
Although single women were less likely to come on their own, Irish women often did so and sent their earnings back home. Most commonly, wives and children waited in the old country until the family breadwinner had secured a job and saved enough money to pay for their passage to America.
Would-be immigrants first had to travel to a port—
Hamburg was a major embarkation point—where they boarded a crowded steamship. The cramped ocean journey was noted for its poor food, lack of privacy, and rudimentary sanitary facilities. Immigrants arrived tired, fearful, and in some cases very sick.
Further complications awaited the travelers when they reached their destination, most often New York City or San Francisco. Customs officials inspected the newcomers for physical handicaps and contagious diseases.
After 1892 those with “loathsome” infections such as leprosy, trachoma (a contagious viral disease of the eye),

75% and over
50—75%
M AP 19.1
Mixed Parentage in Total Population,
10—15% by Countries, 1910
5—10%
As this map indicates, new immigrants rarely settled in the South.
Less than 5%
Source: D.W. Meinig, The Shaping of America—A Geographical Perspective of
500 Years of History.
Yale University Press, Volume 3.
or sexually transmitted diseases were refused admittance and deported. Immigrants who passed the physical examination then had their names recorded. If a customs inspector had difficulty pronouncing a foreign name, he often Anglicized it. One German Jew became flustered when asked for his name and mumbled,
“Schon vergessen [already forgotten],” meaning that he could not recall it. The inspector, who did not understand Yiddish, wrote “Sean Ferguson” on the man’s roster. In this manner, many immigrants ended up with
Americanized names.
In 1855 New York State had established a special facility for admitting immigrants at Castle Garden on the tip of Manhattan Island. Later, when the numbers swelled, the federal government took control and built a new station on Ellis Island in New York harbor in 1892.
Angel Island in San Francisco Bay on the West Coast served a similar purpose after 1910. At the immigrant processing centers, America’s newest residents exchanged foreign currency for U.S. dollars, purchased railroad tickets, and arranged lodgings. In other cities immigrants were hounded by tavernkeepers, peddlers,
Everyday Life in Flux: The New American City
579
75% and over
50—75%
35—50%
25—35%
15—25%
10—15%
5—10%
Less than 5%

580
C HAPTER 19 Immigration, Urbanization, and Everyday Life, 1860–1900 and porters who tried to exploit their ignorance of the
English language and American ways. “When you land in America,” wrote one Swedish resident to friends back home, “you will find many who will offer their services, but beware of them because there are so many rascals who make it their business to cheat the immigrants.”
Those who arrived with sufficient cash, including many German artisans and Scandinavian farmers, commonly traveled west to Chicago, Milwaukee, and the rolling prairies beyond. Most of the Irish, and later the
Italians, who hailed largely from poor peasant backgrounds, remained in eastern cities like Boston, New
York, and Philadelphia. The Irish and Italians who did go west typically made the trip in stages, moving from job to job on the railroad and canal systems.
For many immigrants the stress of adjusting to a new life was eased by the fact that they could settle among compatriots who had preceded them. (Historians call this tendency to relocate near friends or relatives from one’s original town “chain migration.”) If a map of New York
City’s streets and neighborhoods were colored in by nationality, Jacob Riis observed in 1890, it “would show more stripes than on the skin of a zebra, and more colors than any rainbow.” The streets of Manhattan between the West Side Irish neighborhoods and the East Side
German neighborhoods teemed with Poles, Hungarians,
Russians, Italians, and Chinese.
Late-nineteenth-century social commentators often assumed that each nationality clumped together for reasons of national clannishness. But settlement patterns were far more complex. Most immigrants preferred to live near others not merely from their own country but also from their own village or region. On New York’s
Lower East Side, for example, Italians divided into many different subgroups: Neapolitans and Calabrians at
Mulberry Bend, Genoese on Baxter Street, northern
Italians west of Broadway, and Tyrolese Italians on Sixtyninth Street near the Hudson River.
In the competition to get ahead, some immigrant groups adjusted more easily than others. Those with a background in the skilled trades and a familiarity with

Everyday Life in Flux: The New American City
581
Anglo-American customs had relatively few problems.
English-speaking immigrants from the British Isles, particularly those from mill, mining, and manufacturing districts, found comparable work and encountered relatively little discrimination. Ethnic groups that formed a substantial percentage of a city’s population also had a major advantage. The Irish, for example, who by the
1880s made up nearly 16 percent of New York’s population, 8 percent of Chicago’s, and 17 percent of Boston’s, facilitated Irish immigrants’ entry into the American mainstream by dominating Democratic party politics and controlling the hierarchy of the Catholic church in all three cities.
Ironically, domination of urban institutions by members of the larger immigrant groups often made adjustment to American society more difficult for members of smaller groups. Germans and other well-organized and skilled immigrants tended to exclude lessskilled newcomers from desirable jobs. English and
German dominance of the building trades, for example, enabled those nationalities to limit the numbers of
Italians hired.
The diversity of immigrants, even those from the same country, was remarkable. Nevertheless, the experience of being labeled a foreigner and of being discriminated against helped create a new common ethnic identity for many groups. Immigrants from the same home country forged a new sense of ethnic distinctiveness as
Irish-American, German-American, or Jewish-American that helped them downplay internal divisions, compete for political power, and eventually assimilate into mainstream society.
Not all immigrants were interested in assimilation or intended to remain permanently in the United States.
Young Chinese and Italian men often journeyed to
American shores to earn enough money to return home and buy land or set themselves up in business.
Expecting only a brief stay, they made little effort to learn English or understand American customs. Of the
Italians who immigrated to New York before 1914, nearly
50 percent went back to Italy. Although the rate of return migration was greatest among Chinese and Italians, significant numbers of immigrants of other nationalities eventually returned to their homelands as well.
Various factors thus influenced the ability of immigrants to adapt to urban society in America.
Nevertheless, as the number of foreigners in U.S. cities ballooned toward the turn of the century, all immigrant groups faced increasing hostility from white native-born
Americans who not only disliked the newcomers’ social customs but also feared their growing influence. Fearing the loss of the privileges and status that were associated with their white skin color, native-born whites began to stigmatize immigrants as racially different and inferior, even when they were of the same race. Only gradually, and with much effort, did Irish, Jews, Slavs, and
Mediterranean people, although they were biologically
Caucasian, come to be considered “white.”
Every major city had its share of rundown, overcrowded slum neighborhoods. Generally clustered within walking distance of manufacturing districts, slums developed when landlords subdivided old buildings and packed in too many residents. The poorer the renters, the worse the slum. Slums became ghettos when laws, prejudice, and community pressure prevented the tene-

582
C HAPTER 19 Immigration, Urbanization, and Everyday Life, 1860–1900 ment inhabitants from renting elsewhere. During the
1890s Italians in New York, blacks in Philadelphia and
Chicago, Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles, and
Chinese in San Francisco increasingly became locked in segregated ghettos.
Life in the slums was particularly difficult for children. Juvenile diseases such as whooping cough (pertussis), measles, and scarlet fever took a fearful toll, and infant mortality was high. In one immigrant ward in
Chicago in 1900, 20 percent of infants died in their first year of life.
Since tenements often bordered industrial districts, residents had to put up with the noise, pollution, and foul odors of tanneries, foundries, factories, and packing houses. Because most factories used coal-fired steam engines as their energy source, and because coal was also the preferred fuel for heating most apartment houses and businesses, vast quantities of soot and coal dust drifted skyward daily.
Most immigrants stayed in the shabbiest tenements only until they could afford better housing. Blacks, in contrast, were trapped in segregated districts. Driven out of the skilled trades and excluded from most factory work, blacks took menial jobs whose low pay left them little income for housing (see Chapter 18). Racist citydwellers used high rents, real-estate covenants (agreements not to rent or sell to blacks), and neighborhood pressure to exclude them from areas inhabited by whites. Because the numbers of northern urban blacks in 1890 remained relatively small—for example, they composed only 1.2 percent of Cleveland’s population and 1.3 percent of Chicago’s—they could not overcome whites’ concerted campaigns to shut them out.
Nevertheless, as W. E. B. DuBois, a black sociologist, pointed out in The Philadelphia Negro (1899), wealthy black entrepreneurs within these neighborhoods built their own churches, ran successful businesses, and established charitable organizations to help their people.
As remains true today, the same cities that harbored slums, suffering, and violence also boasted neighborhoods of dazzling opulence. Wealthy Americans such as
John D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould built monumental residences near exclusive streets just outside the downtown area. Rockefeller and Gould lived near Fifth Avenue in New York; others lived on Commonwealth Avenue in
Boston, Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, and Summit
Avenue in St. Paul. In the 1870s and 1880s wealthy citydwellers began moving to new suburbs to distance themselves farther from the crowded tenement districts.
Promoters of the suburban ideal, playing on the romantic rural nostalgia popular at the time, contrasted the rolling lawns and stately houses on the city’s periphery with the teeming streets, noisy saloons, and mounds of garbage and horse excrement downtown. Soon many major cities could boast of their own stylish suburbs:
Haverford, Ardmore, and Bryn Mawr outside
Philadelphia; Brookline near Boston; and Shaker
Heights near Cleveland.
Middle-class city-dwellers followed the precedents set by the wealthy. Skilled artisans, shopkeepers, clerks, accountants, and sales personnel moved either to new developments at the city’s edge or to outlying suburban communities (although those at the lower fringe of the middle class typically rented apartments in neighborhoods closer to the city center). Lawyers, doctors, small businessmen, and other professionals moved farther out along the main thoroughfares served by the street railway, where they purchased homes on large lots. By the twentieth century, this process would result in suburban sprawl.
In time, a pattern of informal residential segregation by income took shape in the cities and suburbs. Built up for families of a particular income level, certain neighborhoods and suburbs developed remarkably similar standards for lot size and house design. (Two-story houses with front porches, set back thirty feet from the sidewalk, became the norm in many neighborhoods.)
Commuters who rode the new street railways out from the city center could identify the social class of the suburban dwellers along the way as readily as a geologist might distinguish different strata on a washed-out riverbank.
By 1900 whirring trolley cars and hissing steampowered trains had burst the boundaries of the compact midcentury city. As they expanded, cities often annexed the contingent suburbs. Within this enlarged city, sharp dissimilarities in building height and neighborhood quality set off business sectors from fashionable residential avenues and differentiated squalid manufacturing districts from parklike suburban subdivisions.
Musing about urban America in 1902, James F.
Muirhead, a popular Scottish guidebook author, wrote that New York and other U.S. cities reminded him of “a lady in a ball costume, with diamonds in her ears, and her toes out at her boots.” To Muirhead, urban America had become a “land of contrasts” in which the spatial separations of various social groups and the increasingly dissimilar living conditions for rich and poor had

Middle-Class Society and Culture
583 heightened ethnic, racial, and class divisions. Along with the physical change in American cities, in short, had come a new awareness of class and cultural disparities.
M
-C
S
C
Spared the struggle for survival that confronted most
Americans after the Civil War, society’s middle and upper ranks faced a different challenge: how to rationalize their enjoyment of the products of the emerging consumer society. To justify the position of society’s wealthier members, ministers such as Brooklyn preacher
Henry Ward Beecher and advice-book writers appealed to Victorian morality, a set of social ideas embraced by the privileged classes of England and America during the long reign (1837–1901) of Britain’s Queen Victoria.
E. L. Godkin, the editor of The Nation, Phillips
Brooks, minister to Boston’s Trinity Church, and other proponents of Victorian morality argued that the financial success of the middle and upper classes was linked to their superior talent, intelligence, morality, and selfcontrol. They also extended the antebellum ideal of separate spheres by arguing that women were the driving force for moral improvement. While men were expected to engage in self-disciplined, “manly” dedication to the new industrial order, women would provide the gentle, elevating influence that would lead society in its upward march. While Beecher, Godkin, and others defended the superiority of America’s middle and upper classes, a network of institutions, from elegant department stores and hotels to elite colleges and universities, reinforced the privileged position of these groups.
The Victorian world view, which first emerged in the
1830s and 1840s, rested on a number of assumptions.
One was that human nature was malleable: people could improve themselves. Hence, Victorian Americans were intensely moralistic and eager to reform practices they considered evil or undesirable. A second assumption emphasized the social value of work. Proponents of
Victorian morality believed that a commitment to working hard not only developed personal self-discipline and self-control, but also helped advance the progress of the nation. Finally, Victorian Americans stressed the importance of good manners and the value of literature and the fine arts as marks of a truly civilized society.
Although this genteel outlook set a standard that was often violated in practice, particularly by the middle classes and the rich, it remained an ideal that was widely preached as the norm for all society.
Before the Civil War, reformers such as Henry Ward
Beecher had energized the crusades to abolish slavery and alcoholism by appealing to the ethical standards of
Victorian morality. (Both slavery and intemperance threatened feminine virtue and family life.) After the war,
Beecher and other preachers became less interested in social reform and more preoccupied with the importance of manners and social protocol. Following their advice, middle- and upper-class families in the 1870s and
1880s increasingly defined their own social standing in terms not only of income but also of behavior. Good manners, especially a knowledge of dining and entertaining etiquette, and good posture became important badges of status.
In her popular advice book The American Woman’s
Home (1869), Catharine Beecher (the sister of
Henry Ward Beecher) reflected typical Victorian selfconsciousness about proper manners. The following list of dinner-table behaviors, she said, should be avoided by those of “good breeding”:
Reaching over another person’s plate; standing up to reach distant articles, instead of asking to have them passed; . . . using the table-cloth instead of napkins; eating fast, and in a noisy manner; putting large pieces in the mouth; . . . [and] picking the teeth at the table.
For Beecher and other molders of manners, meals became important rituals that differentiated the social classes. Not only were they occasions for displaying the elaborate china and silver that wealthy families exclusively possessed, but they also provided telltale clues to a family’s level of refinement and sophistication.
The Victorian code—with its emphasis on morals, manners, and proper behavior—thus served to heighten the sense of class differences for the post-Civil War generation. Prominent middle- and upper-class Americans made bold claims about their interest in helping others improve themselves. More often than not, however, their self-righteous, intensely moralistic outlook simply widened the gap that income disparities had already opened.
Victorian views on morality and culture, coupled with rising pressures on consumers to make decisions about a mountain of domestic products, had a subtle but important effect on middle-class expectations about

584
C HAPTER 19 Immigration, Urbanization, and Everyday Life, 1860–1900 women’s role within the home. From the 1840s on, many architects, clergymen, and other promoters of the socalled cult of domesticity had idealized the home as “the woman’s sphere.” They praised the home as a protected retreat where females could express their special maternal gifts, including sensitivity toward children and an aptitude for religion. “The home is the wife’s province,” asserted one writer; “it is her natural field of labor . . . to govern and direct its interior management.”
During the 1880s and 1890s a new obligation was added to the traditional woman’s role as director of the household: to foster an artistic environment that would nurture her family’s cultural improvement. For many
Victorian Americans of the comfortable classes, houses became statements of cultural aspiration. Excluded from the world of business and commerce, many middle- and upper-class women devoted considerable time and energy to decorating their homes, seeking to make the home, as one advice book suggested, “a place of repose, a refuge from the excitement and distractions of outside . . . , provided with every attainable means of rest and recreation.”
Not all middle-class women pursued this domestic ideal. For some, housework and family responsibilities overwhelmed the concern for artistic accomplishment.
For others the artistic ideal was not to their taste.
Sixteen-year-old Mary Putnam complained privately to a friend that she played the piano because of “an abstract general idea . . . of a father coming home regularly tired at night (from the plow, I believe the usual legend runs), and being solaced by the brilliant yet touching performance of a sweet only daughter upon the piano.” She then confessed that she detested the piano.
Increasingly, middle- and upper-class women in the
1880s and 1890s sought other outlets for their creative energies in settlement house work and social reform.
Although Victorian social thought justified the privileged status of the well-to-do, many thrifty people who had grown up in the early nineteenth century found it difficult to accept the new preoccupation with accumulation and display. To dull their pangs of guilt, merchandisers in the 1880s stressed the high quality and low cost of the objects they sold, encouraging Americans to loosen their purse strings and enjoy prosperity without reservations.
A key agent in modifying attitudes about consumption was the department store. In the final quarter of the nineteenth century, innovative entrepreneurs led by
Rowland H. Macy in New York, John Wanamaker in
Philadelphia, and Marshall Field in Chicago built giant department stores that became urban institutions and transformed the shopping experience for the millions of middle- and upper-class consumers who were their greatest patrons.
Merchants like Wanamaker and Macy helped overcome the middle and upper classes’ reluctance to spend by advertising their products at “rock-bottom” prices and engaging in price wars. To avoid keeping their stock too long, they held giant end-of-the-season sales at drastically marked-down prices.
The major department stores tried to make shopping an exciting activity. Not only did rapid turnover of merchandise create a sense of constant novelty, but the mammoth stores themselves were designed as imitation

Middle-Class Society and Culture
585 palaces, complete with stained-glass skylights, marble staircases, brilliant chandeliers, and plush carpets. The large urban department store functioned as a kind of social club and home away from home for comfortably fixed women. Shopping became an adventure, a form of entertainment, and a way to affirm their place in society.
At a time when relatively few Americans had even a high school education, U.S. colleges and universities represented another institutional stronghold of the business and professional elite and the moderately well-to-do middle class. In 1900, despite enrollment increases in the preceding decades, only 4 percent of the nation’s eighteen- to twenty-one-year-olds were enrolled in institutions of higher learning.
Wealthy capitalists gained status and a measure of immortality by endowing colleges and universities.
Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford, launched Stanford University in 1885 with a bequest of
$24 million in memory of their dead son; John D.
Rockefeller donated $34 million to the University of
Chicago in 1891. Industrialists and businessmen dominated the boards of trustees of many educational institutions and forced their probusiness views on administrators. Sardonic economist Thorstein Veblen called these business-oriented academic managers “Captains of Erudition.”
Not only the classroom experience but also social contacts and athletic activities—especially football— prepared affluent young men for later responsibilities in business and the professions. Adapted by American college students in 1869 from English rugby, football was largely an elite sport. But the game, initially played without pads or helmets, was marred by violence. In 1905 eighteen students died of playing-field injuries. Many college presidents dismissed football as a dangerous waste of time and money. In 1873, when the University of Michigan challenged Cornell to a game in Ann Arbor,
Cornell’s president Andrew D. White huffily telegraphed back, “I will not permit thirty men to travel four hundred miles merely to agitate a bag of wind.”
But eager alumni and coaches strongly defended the new sport. Some—among them Henry Lee
Higginson, the Civil War veteran and Boston banker who gave Harvard “Soldiers’ Field” stadium as a memorial to those who had died in battle—praised football as a character-building sport. Others, including famed Yale

586
C HAPTER 19 Immigration, Urbanization, and Everyday Life, 1860–1900 coach Walter Camp, insisted that football could function as a surrogate frontier experience in an increasingly urbanized society. By 1900 collegiate football had become a popular fall ritual, and team captains were campus heroes.
Although postsecondary education remained confined to a small minority, more than 150 new colleges and universities were founded between 1880 and 1900, and enrollments more than doubled. While wealthy capitalists endowed some institutions, others, such as the state universities of the Midwest, were financed largely through public funds generated from state sales of public lands under the Morrill Land Grant Act (1862). Many colleges were also founded and funded by religious denominations.
On the university level, innovative presidents such as Cornell’s Andrew D. White and Harvard’s Charles W.
Eliot sought to change the focus of higher education.
New discoveries in science and medicine sparked the reform. In the 1850s most physicians had attended medical school for only two sixteen-week terms. They typically received their degrees without ever having visited a hospital ward or examined a patient. The Civil War exposed the abysmal state of American medical education. Twice as many soldiers died from infections as from wounds. Doctors were so poorly trained and ignorant about sanitation that they often infected soldiers’ injuries when they probed wounds with hands wiped on pus-stained aprons. “The ignorance and general incompetency of the average graduate of American medical schools, at the time when he receives the degree which turns him loose upon the community,” wrote Eliot in
1870, “is something horrible to contemplate.”
In the 1880s and 1890s the public’s well-justified skepticism about doctors encouraged leading medical professors, many of whom had studied in France and
Germany, to begin restructuring American medical education. Using the experimental method developed by
German scientists, they insisted that all medical students be trained in biology, chemistry, and physics, including laboratory experience. By 1900 graduate medical education had been placed on a firm professional foundation. Similar reforms took place in undergraduate and graduate programs in architecture, engineering, and law.
These changes were part of a larger transformation in higher education after the Civil War that gave rise to a new institution, the research university. Unlike the best of the mid-nineteenth-century colleges, whose narrow, unvarying curriculum focused on teaching Latin and
Greek, theology, logic, and mathematics, the new research universities offered courses in a wide variety of subject areas, established professional schools, and encouraged faculty members to pursue basic research.
For President Andrew D. White of Cornell University, the objective was to create an environment “where any person can find instruction in any study.” At Cornell, the
University of Wisconsin at Madison, Johns Hopkins,
Harvard, and other institutions, this new conception of higher education laid the groundwork for the central role that America’s universities would play in the intellectual, cultural, and scientific life of the twentieth century.
Despite these significant changes, higher education remained largely the privilege of a few as the nineteenth century ended. The era when college attendance would become the norm rather than the rare exception lay many years ahead.
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The contrast between the affluent world of the collegeeducated middle and upper classes and the gritty lives of the working class was most graphically displayed in the nation’s growing urban centers, where immigrant newcomers reshaped political and social institutions to meet their own needs. If fancy department stores and elegant hotels furnished new social spaces for the middle and upper classes, saloons became the poor man’s

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587 club, and dance halls became single women’s home away from home. While the rich and the wellborn looked askance at lower-class recreational activities and sought to force the poor to change their ways, working-class
Americans, the immigrant newcomers in particular, fought to preserve their own distinctive way of life.
Indeed, the late nineteenth century witnessed an ongoing battle to eradicate social drinking, reform ”boss” politics, and curb lower-class recreational activities.
Earlier in the century the swelling numbers of urban poor had given rise to a new kind of politician, the
“boss,” who listened to his urban constituents and lobbied to improve their lot. The boss presided over the city’s “machine”—an unofficial political organization designed to keep a particular party or faction in office.
Whether officially serving as mayor or not, the boss, assisted by local ward or precinct captains, wielded enormous influence in city government. Often a former saloonkeeper or labor leader, the boss knew his constituents well.
For better or worse, the political machine was
America’s unique contribution to municipal government in an era of pell-mell urban growth. Typified by
Tammany Hall, the Democratic organization that dominated New York City politics from the 1830s to the 1930s, machines emerged in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Atlanta,
San Francisco, and a host of other cities during the
Gilded Age.
By the turn of the century, many cities had experienced machine rule. Working through the local ward captains to turn out unusually high numbers of voters
(see Chapter 20), the machine rode herd on the tangle of municipal bureaucracies, controlling who was hired for the police and fire departments. It rewarded its friends and punished its enemies through its control of taxes, licenses, and inspections. The machine gave tax breaks to favored contractors in return for large payoffs and slipped them insider information about upcoming street and sewer projects. (On water service in the city, see Technology and Culture, Flush Toilets and the
Invention of the Nineteenth-Century Bathroom, in
Chapter 18).
At the neighborhood level, the ward boss often acted as a welfare agent, helping the needy and protecting the troubled. It was important to the boss that he be viewed as generous to his constituents. To spend three dollars to pay a fine for a juvenile offense meant a lot to the poor, but it was small change to a boss who raked in millions from public-utility contracts and land deals.
While the machine helped alleviate some suffering, it entangled urban social services with corrupt politics and often prevented city government from responding to the real problems of the city’s neediest inhabitants.
Under New York City’s boss William Marcy Tweed, the Tammany Hall machine revealed the slimy depths to which extortion and contract padding could sink.
Between 1869 and 1871, Tweed gave $50,000 to the poor and $2,250,000 to schools, orphanages, and hospitals. In these same years, his machine dispensed sixty thousand patronage positions and pumped up the city’s debt by
$70 million through graft and inflated contracts. The details of the Tweed ring’s massive fraud and corruption were brilliantly satirized in Harper’s Weekly by German immigrant cartoonist Thomas Nast. In one cartoon Nast portrayed Tweed and his cronies as vultures picking at

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By the turn of the century the bosses were facing well-organized assaults on their power, led by an urban elite whose members sought to restore “good government” (see Chapter 21). In this atmosphere the bosses increasingly forged alliances with civic organizations and reform leagues. The results, although never entirely satisfactory to any of the parties involved, paved the way for new sewer and transportation systems, expanded parklands, and improved public services—a record of considerable accomplishment, given the magnitude of the problems created by urban growth.
Impatient with the political bosses’ piecemeal attempts to help the urban poor, middle-class city leaders sought comprehensive solutions for relieving poverty. Jacob Riis and the first generation of reformers believed that the basic cause of urban distress was the immigrants’ lack of self-discipline and self-control. Consequently, Riis and his peers focused on moral improvement. Only later would Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, and other settlement house workers examine the crippling impact of low wages and dangerous working conditions. Although many reformers genuinely sympathized with the suffering of the lower classes, the humanitarians often turned their campaigns to help the destitute into missions to
Americanize the immigrants and eliminate customs that they perceived as offensive and self-destructive.
Poverty-relief workers first targeted their efforts at the young, who were thought to be most impressionable. Energized by the religious revivals of the 1830s and
1840s, Protestant reformers started charitable societies to help transient youths and abandoned street children.
In 1843 Robert M. Hartley, a former employee of the New
York Temperance Society, organized the New York
Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor to urge poor families to change their ways.
Hartley’s voluntaristic approach was supplemented by the more coercive tactics of Charles Loring Brace, who founded the New York Children’s Aid Society in
1853. Brace admired “these little traders of the city . . . battling for a hard living in the snow and mud of the street” but worried that they might join the city’s
“dangerous classes.” Brace established dormitories, reading rooms, and workshops where the boys could learn practical skills; he also swept orphaned children

Working-Class Politics and Reform
589 off the streets, shipped them to the country, and placed them with families to work as farm hands.
Where Brace’s Children’s Aid Society gave adolescents an alternative to living in the slums, the Young
Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), founded in England in 1841 and exported to America ten years later, provided housing and wholesome recreation for country boys who had migrated to the city. The Young Women’s Christian
Association (YWCA) similarly provided housing and a day nursery for young women and their children. In the
Protestant tradition of moral improvement, both organizations subjected their members to curfews and expelled them for drinking and other forbidden behavior.
By 1900 more than fifteen hundred YMCAs and
YWCAs served as havens for nearly a quarter-million young men and women. But YMCA and YWCA leaders reached only a small portion of the young adult population. Some whom they sought to help were put off by the organizations’ close supervision and moralistic stance.
Others, eager to assert their independence, preferred not to ask for help. Although charity workers made some progress in their efforts to aid youth, the strategy was too narrowly focused to stem the rising tide of urban problems.
during the Civil War, and she wore black for the rest of her life. Adopting what they considered a scientific approach to make aid to the poor more efficient, Lowell and the COS leaders divided New York City into districts, compiled files on all aid recipients, and sent “friendly visitors” into the tenements to counsel families on how to improve their lives. Convinced that moral deficiencies lay at the root of poverty and that the “promiscuous charity” of overlapping church welfare agencies undermined the desire to work, the COS tried to foster self-sufficiency in its charges. In 1891, Lowell helped found the
Consumers’ League of New York.
Although the COS did serve as a useful coordinator for relief efforts and developed helpful statistics on the extent of poverty, critics justly accused the society of being more interested in controlling the poor than in alleviating their suffering. One of the manuals, for example, stressed the importance of introducing “messy housekeepers” to the “pleasures of a cheery, wellordered home.” Unable to see slum problems from the vantage point of the poor, they failed, for the most part, in their underlying objective: to convert the poor to their own standards of morality and decorum.
The inability of the Children’s Aid Society, YMCA, YWCA, and other relief organizations to cope with the explosive growth of the urban poor in the 1870s and 1880s convinced some reformers to search for other ways to fight poverty. One of the earliest and most effective agencies was the Salvation Army. A church established along pseudomilitary lines in England in 1865 by Methodist minister “General” William Booth, the Salvation Army sent its uniformed volunteers to the United States in
1880 to provide food, shelter, and temporary employment for families. Known for its rousing music and attention-getting street meetings, the group ran soup kitchens and day nurseries and dispatched its “slum brigades” to carry the message of morality to the immigrant poor. The army’s strategy was simple. Attract the poor with marching bands and lively preaching; follow up with offers of food, assistance, and employment; and then teach them the solid middle-class virtues of temperance, hard work, and self-discipline.
A similar approach to poor relief was implemented by the New York Charity Organization Society (COS), founded in 1882 by Josephine Shaw Lowell. Of a prominent Boston family, the strong-willed Lowell had been widowed when her husband of a few months was killed
The failure of Josephine Shaw Lowell and other likeminded social disciplinarians to eradicate urban poverty prompted other reformers to push for even tougher measures against sin and immorality. In 1872 Anthony
Comstock, a pious young dry-goods clerk, founded the
New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. The organization demanded that municipal authorities close down gambling and lottery operations and censor obscene publications.
Nothing symbolized the contested terrain between middle- and lower-class culture better than the fight over prostitution. Considered socially degenerate by some and a source of recreation by others, prostitution both exploited women and offered them a steady income and a measure of personal freedom. After the
Civil War, the number of brothels—specialized houses controlled by women known as madams where prostitutes plied their trade—expanded rapidly. In the 1880s saloons, tenements, and cabarets, often controlled by political machines, hired prostitutes of their own. Even though immigrant women do not appear to have made up the majority of big-city prostitutes, reformers often labeled them as the major source of the problem.
In 1892 brothels, along with gambling dens and saloons, became targets for the reform efforts of New

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York Presbyterian minister Charles Parkhurst. Blaming the “slimy, oozy soil of Tammany Hall” and the New York
City police—“the dirtiest, crookedest, and ugliest lot of men ever combined in semi-military array outside of
Japan and Turkey”—for the city’s rampant evils, he organized the City Vigilance League to clean up the city.
Two years later a nonpartisan Committee of Seventy elected a new mayor who pressured city officials to enforce the laws against prostitution, gambling, and
Sunday liquor sales.
The purity campaign lasted scarcely three years. The reform coalition quickly fell apart. New York City’s population was too large, and its ethnic constituencies too diverse, for middle- and upper-class reformers to curb all the illegal activities flourishing within the sprawling metropolis.
truly Christian society would unite all churches, reorganize the industrial system, and work for international peace. Rauschenbusch’s appeal for Christian unity led to the formation of the Federal Council of Churches in
1908, but his other goals were never achieved. The Social
Gospel’s attack on what its leaders blasted as the complacent Christian support of the status quo attracted only a handful of Protestants. Nevertheless, their earnest voices blended with a growing chorus of critics bemoaning the nation’s urban woes.
In the 1870s and 1880s a handful of Protestant ministers began to explore several radical alternatives for aiding the poor. Instead of focusing on their alleged moral flaws and character defects, these ministers argued that the rich and the wellborn deserved part of the blame for urban poverty and thus had a responsibility to do something about it.
William S. Rainsford, the Irish-born minister of New
York City’s Saint George’s Episcopal Church, pioneered the development of the so-called institutional church movement. Large downtown churches in once-elite districts that had been overrun by immigrants would provide their new neighbors with social services as well as a place to worship. With the financial help of J. Pierpont
Morgan, a warden of his church, Rainsford organized a boys’ club, built church recreational facilities for the destitute on the Lower East Side, and established an industrial training program.
Another effort within Protestantism to right contemporary social wrongs was the Social Gospel movement launched in the 1870s by Washington Gladden, a
Congregational minister in Columbus, Ohio. Gladden insisted that true Christianity commits men and women to fight social injustice wherever it exists. Thus, in response to the wave of violent strikes in 1877, he urged church leaders to mediate the conflict between business and labor. Their attempt to do so was unsuccessful.
If Gladden set the tone for the Social Gospel, Walter
Rauschenbusch, a minister at a German Baptist church in New York’s notorious “Hell’s Kitchen” neighborhood, articulated the movement’s central philosophy.
Educated in Germany, Rauschenbusch argued that a
By the 1880s many thoughtful Americans had become convinced that reform pressures applied from the top by the Charity Organization Society and the purity crusaders, however well intentioned, were not only ineffective but were also wrongheaded. A new approach to social work was needed. Relief workers would have to take up residence in poor neighborhoods where, in the words of Jane Addams, an early advocate of the movement, they could see firsthand “the struggle for existence, which is so much harsher among people near the edge of pauperism.” A new institution—the settlement house—was born.
The youngest daughter of a successful Illinois businessman, Jane Addams purchased a dilapidated mansion on Chicago’s South Halsted Street in 1889. After overseeing extensive repairs, she and her coworkers opened it as
Hull House, the first experiment in the settlement house approach. Drawing on the middle-class domestic ideal of true womanhood as supportive and self-sacrificing, the indefatigable Addams turned Hull House into a social center for recent immigrants. She and her coworkers invited them to plays; sponsored art projects; held classes in English, civics, cooking, and dressmaking; and encouraged them to preserve their traditional crafts. She set up a kindergarten, a laundry, an employment bureau, and a day nursery for working mothers. Hull House also sponsored recreational and athletic programs and dispensed legal aid and health care.
In the hope of upgrading the filthy and overcrowded housing in its environs, Addams and her coworkers made studies of city housing conditions and pressured politicians to enforce sanitation regulations. For a time, demonstrating her principle of direct engagement with the lives of the poor, Addams even served as garbage inspector for her local ward.
By 1895 at least fifty settlement houses had opened in cities around the nation. Settlement house leaders trained a generation of young college students, mostly

Working-Class Leisure in the Immigrant City
591 women, many of whom would later serve as state and local government officials. Florence Kelley, for example, who had worked at Hull House, became the chief factory inspector for Illinois in 1893. For Kelley as for other young female settlement workers, settlement houses functioned as a supportive sisterhood of reform through which they developed skills in working with municipal governments. Many settlement house veterans would later draw on their experience to play an influential role in the regulatory movements of the Progressive Era (see
Chapter 21). Through their sympathetic attitudes toward the immigrants and their systematic publication of data about slum conditions, settlement house workers gave turn-of-the-century Americans new hope that the city’s problems could be overcome.
But in their attempt to promote class cooperation and social harmony, settlement houses had mixed success. Although many immigrants appreciated the settlement houses’ resources and activities, they felt that the reformers were uninterested in increasing their political power. Settlement house workers did tend to overlook immigrant organizations and their leaders. In 1894 Hull
House attracted two thousand visitors per week, but this was only a fraction of the more than seventy thousand people who lived within six blocks of the building.
“They’re like the rest,” complained one immigrant, “a bunch of people planning for us and deciding what is good for us without consulting us or taking us into their confidence.”
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In colonial America preachers had linked leisure time to
“idleness,” a dangerous step on the road to sin and wickedness. In the overwhelmingly rural culture of the early nineteenth century, the unremitting routines of farm labor left little time for relaxation. Family picnics, horse races, county fairs, revival meetings, and Fourth of
July and Christmas celebrations had provided occasional permissible diversions. But most Americans continued to view leisure activities skeptically. Henry Clay Work’s popular song “My Grandfather’s Clock” (1876), which praised the ancient timepiece for “wasting no time” and working “ninety years, without slumbering,” bore witness to the tenacity of this deep-seated reverence for work and suspicion of leisure.
After the Civil War, as immigration soared, urban populations shot up, and a new class of wealthy entrepreneurs arose, striking new patterns of leisure and amusement emerged, most notably among the urban working class. Middle-class educators and moralists continued to ponder the distinction between “wholesome” and “unwholesome” recreation, but they were little heeded by immigrants in the throbbing cities. After spending long hours in factories, in mills, behind department-store counters, or working as domestic servants in the homes of the wealthy, working-class
Americans sought relaxation and diversion. Scorning

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C HAPTER 19 Immigration, Urbanization, and Everyday Life, 1860–1900 the museums and concert halls favored by the wealthy, they thronged the streets, patronized saloons and dance halls, cheered at boxing matches and baseball games, and organized group picnics and holiday celebrations.
As amusement parks, vaudeville theaters, sporting clubs, and racetracks provided further outlets for workers’ need for entertainment, leisure became a big business catering to a mass public rather than to a wealthy elite.
For millions of working-class Americans, leisure time took on increasing importance as factory work became ever more routinized and impersonal. Although many recreational activities involved both men and women, others attracted one gender in particular.
Saloons offered an intensely male environment where patrons could share good stories, discuss and bet on sporting events, and momentarily put aside pressures of job and family. Young working women preferred to share confidences with friends in informal social clubs, tried out new fashions in street promenading, and found excitement in neighborhood dance halls and amusement parks.
No segment of the population had a greater need for amusement and recreation than the urban working class.
Hours of tedious, highly disciplined, and physically exhausting labor left workers tired and thirsting for excitement and escape at the end of the day. A banner carried by the Worcester, Massachusetts, carpenters’ union in an 1889 demonstration for the eight-hour workday summed up the importance of workers’ leisure hours: “EIGHT HOURS FOR WORK, EIGHT HOURS FOR
REST, AND EIGHT HOURS FOR WHAT WE WILL.”
City streets provided recreation that anyone could afford. Relaxing after a day’s work, shop girls and laborers clustered on busy corners, watching shouting pushcart peddlers and listening to organ grinders and buskers (street musicians) play familiar melodies. For a penny or a nickel, they could buy bagels, baked potatoes, soda, and other foods and drinks. In the summer, when the heat and humidity in tenement apartments reached unbearable levels, the streets became a hive of neighborhood social life. One immigrant fondly recalled

Working-Class Leisure in the Immigrant City
593 his boyhood on the streets of New York’s Lower East Side,
“Something was always happening, and our attention was continually being shifted from one excitement to another.”
The streets were open to all, but other leisure institutions drew mainly a male clientele. For example, in cities with a strong German immigrant presence like
Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati, gymnastic clubs
(called Turnverein ) and singing societies ( Gesangverein ) provided both companionship and the opportunity to perpetuate old-world cultural traditions.
For workmen of all ethnic backgrounds, saloons offered companionship, conviviality, and five-cent beer, often with a free lunch thrown in. New York City had an estimated ten thousand saloons by 1900 and Denver nearly five hundred. As neighborhood gathering places, saloons reinforced group identity and became centers for immigrant politics. Saloonkeepers, who often doubled as local ward bosses, performed small services for their patrons, including finding jobs and writing letters for illiterate immigrants. Sports memorabilia and pictures of prominent prizefighters adorned saloon walls.
With their rich mahogany bars, etched glass, shiny brass rails, and elegant mirrors, saloons provided patrons with a taste of high-toned luxury. Although working-class women rarely joined their husbands at the saloon, they might send a son or daughter to the corner pub to fetch a “growler”—a large tin pail of beer.
The conventions of saloon culture thus stood in marked contrast to both the socially isolating routines of factory labor and the increasingly private and familycentered social life of the middle class. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to view the old-time saloon through a haze of sentimental nostalgia. Prostitution and crime flourished in the rougher saloons. Moreover, drunken husbands sometimes beat their wives and children, squandered their limited income, and lost their jobs.
The pervasiveness of alcoholism was devastating.
Temperance reformers, in their attack on saloons, targeted a widespread social problem.
For working-class men, bare-knuckled prizefighting became one of the most popular amusements. Drawing its heroes from the poorer ranks of society, the ring became an arena where lower-class men could assert their individuality and physical prowess. In East Coast cities, blacks, Irish, and Germans formed their own
“sporting clubs” and used athletics to bolster their selfconfidence and reaffirm their racial or ethnic identity.
Contrary to the prevailing myth, schoolboy Abner
Doubleday did not invent baseball in Cooperstown, New
York, in 1839. As an English game called rounders, the pastime had existed in one form or another since the seventeenth century. But if Americans did not create

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C HAPTER 19 Immigration, Urbanization, and Everyday Life, 1860–1900 baseball, they unquestionably took this informal children’s game and turned it into a major professional sport. The first organized baseball team, the New York
Knickerbockers, was formed in 1845. In the 1860s the rules were codified, and the sport assumed its modern form. Overhand pitches replaced underhand tosses.
Fielders, who now wore gloves, had to catch the ball on the fly to make an out instead of fielding it on one bounce. Games were standardized at nine innings, and bases were spaced ninety feet apart, as they are today.
In that same decade, promoters organized professional clubs and began to charge admission and compete for players. The Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first team to put its players under contract for the whole season, gained fame in 1869 by touring the country and ending the season with fifty-seven wins and no losses.
Team owners organized the National League in 1876, took control from the players by requiring them to sign contracts that barred them from playing for rival organizations, and limited each city to one professional team.
Soon the owners were filling baseball parks with crowds of ten to twelve thousand fans and earning enormous profits. By the 1890s baseball had become big business.
Although baseball attracted a national following from all social levels, the working class particularly took the sport to heart. The most profitable teams were those in major industrial cities with a large working-class population. Workers attended the games when they could and avidly followed their team’s progress when they could not. Some saloons reported scores on blackboards. In Cleveland just after the turn of the century,
Mayor Tom Johnson erected a bulletin board downtown that recorded game results.
Newspapers thrived on baseball. Joseph Pulitzer introduced the first separate sports page when he bought the New York World in 1883, and much of the sporting news in the World and other papers was devoted to baseball. For the benefit of German immigrants, the New York
Staats Zeitung published a glossary of German equivalents of baseball terms; for example, umpire was Unparteiischer . Baseball, declared novelist Mark Twain in a burst of hyperbole, had become “the very symbol . . .
and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century.”
Although no organized sport attracted as large a following as baseball, horse racing and boxing contests were also widely covered in the popular press and drew big crowds of spectators and bettors. Whereas races like
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595 events for the rich, professional boxing aroused more passionate devotion among the working class. By far the most popular sports hero of the nineteenth century was heavyweight fighter John L. Sullivan, “the Boston Strong
Boy.” Of Irish immigrant stock, Sullivan began boxing in
1877 at the age of nineteen. His first professional fight came in 1880 when he knocked out John Donaldson, “the
Champion of the West,” in a Cincinnati beer hall. With his massive physique, handlebar mustache, and arrogant swagger, Sullivan was enormously popular among immigrants. Barnstorming across the country, he vanquished a succession of local strong men, invariably wearing his trademark green tights with an American flag wrapped around his middle. Cleverly, Sullivan also refused to fight blacks, in deference, he said, to the wishes of his fans.
This policy conveniently allowed him to avoid facing the finest boxer of the 1880s, the Australian black, Peter
Jackson.
Sullivan loved drink and high living, and by the end of the eighties he was sadly out of shape. But when the editor of the Police Gazette , a sensational tabloid, designed a new heavyweight championship belt— allegedly containing two hundred ounces of silver and encrusted with diamonds and pure gold—and awarded it to Sullivan’s rival Jake Kilrain, the champion had to defend himself. The two met on a sweltering, hundreddegree day in New Orleans in July 1889 for the last bareknuckles championship match. After seventy-five short but grueling rounds, Kilrain’s managers threw in the towel. Newspapers around the nation banner-headlined the story. Contemptuously returning the championship belt to the Police Gazette after having had it appraised at
$175, Sullivan went on the road to star in a melodrama written specifically for him. Playing the role of a blacksmith, he (in the words of a recent historian of bareknuckles boxing) “pounded an anvil, beat a bully, and mutilated his lines.” But his fans did not care; he was one of them, and they adored him. As one admirer wrote,
His colors are the Stars and Stripes,
He also wears the green,
And he’s the grandest slugger that
The ring has ever seen.
In contrast to the male preserve of saloons and prizefights, the world of vaudeville, amusement parks, and neighborhood dance pavilions welcomed all comers regardless of gender. Some of them proved particularly congenial to working-class women.
Vaudeville evolved out of the pre-Civil War minstrel shows in which white comedians made up as blacks had performed songs and comic sketches. Vaudeville performances offered a succession of acts, all designed for mass appeal. The shows typically opened with a trained animal routine or a dance number. This were followed by a musical interlude featuring sentimental favorites such as “On the Banks of the Wabash Far Away” or new hits such as “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis,” a jaunty spoof of a young wife’s frustration with her stick-in-the-mud husband. Comic skits followed, ridiculing the trials of urban life, satirizing the ineptitude of the police and municipal officials, poking fun at the babel of accents in the immigrant city, and mining a rich vein of broad ethnic humor and stereotypes. After more musical numbers and acts by ventriloquists, pantomimes, and magicians, the program ended with a “flash” finale such as flyingtrapeze artists swinging against a black background.
By the 1880s vaudeville was drawing larger crowds than any other form of theater. Not only did it provide an inexpensive evening of lighthearted entertainment, but in the comic sketches, immigrant audiences could also laugh at their own experience as they saw it translated into slapstick and caricature.
The white working class’s fascination with vaudeville’s blackface acts has been the subject of considerable recent scrutiny by historians. Some have interpreted it as a way for the white working class to mock middle-class ideals. By pretending to act like the popular stereotypes of blacks, white working-class youths could challenge traditional family structures, the virtue of sexual selfdenial, and adult expectations about working hard. In this view popular culture was making fun of the ideals of thrift and propriety being promoted in marketplace and domestic ideology. Other historians have argued that blackface buffoonery, with its grotesque, demeaning caricatures of African-Americans, reinforced prejudice against blacks and restricted their escape from lowerclass status. Paradoxically, therefore, the popularity of blackface vaudeville acts reinforced white racial solidarity and strengthened the expanding wall separating whites and African-Americans.
Where vaudeville offered psychological escape from the stresses of working-class life by exploiting its comic potential, amusement parks provided physical escape, at least for a day. The prototype of the sprawling urban amusement park was New York’s Coney Island, a section of Brooklyn’s oceanfront that evolved into a resort for the masses in the 1870s. At Coney Island young couples went dancing, rode through the dark Tunnel of Love, sped down the dizzying roller coaster in Steeplechase

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Park, or watched belly dancers in the carnival atmosphere of the sideshows. Customers were encouraged to surrender to the spirit of play, forget the demands of the industrial world, and lose themselves in fantasy.
By the end of the nineteenth century, New York City had well over three hundred thousand female wage earners, most of them young, unmarried women working as seamstresses, laundresses, typists, domestic servants, and department store clerks. For this army of low-paid young working women and their counterparts in other cities, amusement parks exerted a powerful lure. Here they could meet friends, spend time with young men beyond the watchful eyes of their parents, show off their new dresses, and try out the latest dance steps. As a twenty-year-old German immigrant woman who worked as a servant in a wealthy household observed,
I have heard some of the high people with whom I have been living say that Coney Island is not tony.
The trouble is that these high people don’t know how to dance. I have to laugh when I see them at their balls and parties. If only I could get out on the floor and show them how—they would be astonished.
For such women, the brightly decorated dance pavilion, the exciting music, and the spell of a warm summer night could seem a magical release from the drudgery of daily life.
Since the days of slavery, black Americans had developed a strong, creative musical culture, and thus it is not surprising that blacks made a major contribution to the popular music of the late nineteenth century in the form of ragtime. Nothing could illustrate more sharply the differences between middle- and working-class culture than the contrasting styles of popular music they favored. The middle class preferred hymns or songs that conveyed a moral lesson. The working class delighted in ragtime, which originated in the 1880s with black musicians in the saloons and brothels of the South and
Midwest and was played strictly for entertainment (see
A Place in Time: New Orleans, Louisiana, 1890s).
Ragtime developed out of the rich tradition of sacred and secular songs through which African-
Americans had long eased the burdens of their lives.
Like spirituals, ragtime used syncopated rhythms and complex harmonies, but it blended these with marching-band musical structures to create a distinctive style.
A favorite of “honky-tonk” piano players, ragtime was introduced to the broader public in the 1890s and became a national sensation.
The reasons for the sudden ragtime craze were complex. Inventive, playful, with catchy syncopations and an infectious rhythm in the bass clef, the music displayed an originality that had an appeal all its own.
Part of ragtime’s popularity also came from its origin in brothels and its association with blacks, who were widely stereotyped in the 1890s as sexual, sensual, and uninhibited by the rigid Victorian social conventions that restricted whites. The “wild” and complex rhythms of ragtime were widely interpreted to be a freer and more “natural” expression of elemental feelings about love and sex.
Ragtime’s great popularity proved a mixed blessing for blacks. It testified to the achievements of brilliant composers like Scott Joplin, helped break down the barriers faced by blacks in the music industry, and contributed to a spreading rebellion against the repressiveness of
Victorian standards. But ragtime simply confirmed some whites’ stereotype of blacks as primitive and sensual, a bias that underlay the racism of the period and helped justify segregation and discrimination.
C
C
In the late nineteenth century the United States was embroiled in class conflict and cultural unrest. Part of this turmoil raged within the middle class itself.
Victorian morality and genteel cultural standards were never totally accepted even within the elite and middle classes; and as the century ended, ethical questionings and new cultural stirrings intensified. Women stood at the center of the era’s cultural turbulence. Thwarted by a restrictive code of feminine propriety, middle-class women made their dissatisfactions heard. Developments as diverse as the rise of women’s clubs, the growth of women’s colleges, and an 1890s bicycle fad contributed to the emergence of what some began to call the “new woman.”
Although Victorian culture was challenged from within the middle class, a widening chasm divided the wellto-do from urban working-class immigrants. In no period of American history have class conflicts—cultural as well as economic—been more open and raw. As middle-class leaders nervously eyed the rambunctious and sometimes disorderly culture of city streets, saloons, boxing clubs, dance halls, and amusement parks, they saw a massive if unconscious challenge to their own cultural and social standing. Some middle-class reformers promoted the public school as a way to impose middle-class

Cultures in Conflict
597 values on the urban masses. Others battled the hydraheaded manifestations of urban “vice” and “immorality.”
But ultimately it was the polite mores of the middle class, not urban working-class culture, that proved more vulnerable. By 1900 the Victorian social and moral ethos was crumbling on every front.
What was this genteel culture that aroused such opposition? In the 1870s and 1880s a group of upper-class writers and magazine editors, led by Harvard art history professor Charles Eliot Norton and New York editors
Richard Watson Gilder of The Century magazine and E.
L. Godkin of The Nation, codified Victorian standards for literature and the fine arts. They joined forces with artistic allies in Boston and New York in a campaign to improve American taste in interior furnishings, textiles, ceramics, wallpaper, and books. By fashioning rigorous criteria for excellence in writing and design, they hoped to create a coherent national artistic culture.
In the 1880s Norton, Godkin, and Gilder, joined by the editors of other highbrow periodicals such as the
Atlantic Monthly and North American Review , set up new guidelines for serious literature. They lectured the middle class about the value of high culture and the insights to be gained from the fine arts. They censored their own publications to remove all sexual allusions, vulgar slang, disrespectful treatments of Christianity, and unhappy endings. Expanding their combined circulation to nearly two hundred thousand copies and opening their magazines to a variety of new authors, Godkin and the other editors of “quality” periodicals created an important forum for serious writing. Novelists Henry
James, who published virtually all of his work in the
Atlantic , and William Dean Howells, who served as editor of the same magazine, helped lead this elite literary establishment. James believed that “it is art that makes

A P l a c e i n T i m e
New Orleans was a unique city in the
1890s. Its popular culture fused elements from the culinary and musical traditions of the varied groups in its population, especially its free blacks and Creoles of color. The latter were the offspring of
Africans and eighteenth-century Spanish and French immigrants who had settled along the swampy bayous of the Mississippi Delta south of the city. During the early nineteenth century, New Orleans’s large free-black and “colored” Creole population had enjoyed a degree of independence people of color found nowhere else in the
South. Free blacks had established their own churches and fraternal societies, formed their own militia, and borne arms. Both wealthy and poor free blacks had created a distinctive culture melding African and French customs. In the Vieux Carré, the old French part of the city, slaves and free blacks joined together on Sunday afternoons to play drums, banjos, and violins. Young people danced and sang, mingling African voodoo rhythms with Roman Catholic liturgical melodies.
During the Civil War and Reconstruction, however, the humiliating occupation of New Orleans by federal troops had left a legacy of southern white bitterness against the black population. Then in the 1880s and 1890s, when Italian immigrants swelled the city’s population, racial tensions were rekindled.
Despite the discord, festivals like Mardi Gras, with its riotous parades and boisterous balls, continued. The city won notoriety for racetrack betting, gambling, and prostitution. Sightseers flocked to
New Orleans to savor spicy Creole food, drink in smoky bars, and visit seedy bordellos and raunchy dance halls. The sidewalks thronged with commercial travelers, longshoremen, country folk in the city for a day, and racetrack bettors.
“One is apt to see here at some hour of the day anybody from a St. Louis capitalist to the man who came the night before with no change of linen, and seven dollars sewn in his waistcoat,” wrote a visiting journalist. Appropriately, promoters chose New Orleans as the site of the
September 1892 championship boxing match in which “Gentleman Jim” Corbett defeated John L.
Sullivan.
Among the city’s liveliest traditions was the marching band. A product of the eighteenth-century military whose drummers and fifers helped identify regiments’ locations amidst battlefield chaos, by the mid-nineteenth century the marching band had become a fixture in cities and towns
598

across America, and prominently so in New Orleans. On
Saturday nights, young and old alike ambled to the citypark bandstand to hear local groups belt out the stirring marches of John Philip Sousa and other composers.
New Orleans’s black brass bands pioneered new playing styles that captured national attention. Having snapped up the affordable used musical instruments piled high in pawn shops after the Civil War, blacks in
New Orleans—unfettered by written scores and formal music lessons—developed innovative styles for bugles, trombones, and the newly invented piston-valve trumpets. Every black social organization, club, fire station, and lodge boasted its own twelve-member brass marching band. The bands played at picnics, parades, dances, church socials, circuses, minstrel shows, athletic contests, and holiday gatherings. By the 1880s many brass bands gained fame for playing in the new “ratty,” “raggy,” unscored, syncopated style, with its echoes of the older call-and-response African-American singing in which one person shouted a phrase and was answered by the group. Brass bands were also known for playing religious hymns “straight” on the way to the cemetery and “jazzing them up” on the way home. Within the bands, which often played in bars and brothels, individual soloists such as coronetist Charles “Buddy” Bolden became famous for improvisational blues solos. These soulful performances were the forerunners of a new musical style, “jazz,” that emerged in the 1890s and became a national rage after the turn of the century.
Although the popularity of these musicians—who were later immortalized in Irving Berlin’s song
“Alexander’s Ragtime Band”—increasingly attracted middle-class white audiences and seemed to imply a growing general acceptance of black musicians, racial prejudice continued to shape local practices. If a black band marched into a white neighborhood, the residents commonly pelted the musicians with rocks.
In 1897, seeking to isolate and regulate prostitution, city administrators created a special district, named
Storyville after Sydney Story, the councilman who proposed the new quarter. Storyville’s glittering saloons and ubiquitous houses of prostitution hired some of the best black ragtime piano players. Other black musicians, excluded from some white establishments, could find jobs only in the racially segregated bars and cabarets of the two-block “Tango Belt” surrounding Storyville.
Musically talented Creoles of color—the proud descendants of free-black mulattos whose musical training had assured them positions in local orchestras and opera houses—could secure employment only in these districts, where they worked alongside criminals and prostitutes.
For all its uniqueness, New Orleans typified larger strands in the turn-of-the-century American fabric. (The city’s cultural diversity also anticipated trends that in the twentieth century would make the United States a truly multicultural society.) And the complex history of early jazz in New Orleans paralleled the ironic relationship of popular culture and racism in the larger society. White middle-class America, like the middle class in New
Orleans, would soon embrace this African-American musical contribution. Captivated by New Orleans
“Dixieland” jazz, they would idolize its best practitioners, including the great trumpeter Louis Armstrong, a veteran of the New Orleans brass marching bands. Yet these middle-class Americans, like their counterparts in New
Orleans, would see no contradiction in harboring deep prejudices against the very people from whose culture this vital new music had emerged.
599

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C HAPTER 19 Immigration, Urbanization, and Everyday Life, 1860–1900 life, . . . [There is] no substitute whatever for [its] force and beauty. . . .”
This interest in art for art’s sake paralleled a broader crusade called the “aesthetic movement,” led in England by William Morris, Oscar Wilde, and other art critics, who sought to bring art into every facet of life. In
America, Candace Wheeler and other reformers made its influence felt through the work of architects, jewelers, and interior decorators.
Although the magazines initially provided an important forum for new writers, their editors’ elitism and desire to control the nation’s literary standards soon aroused opposition. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, spoke for many young writers when he declared that he was through with “literature and all that bosh.” Attacking aristocratic literary conventions, Twain and other authors who shared his concerns explored new forms of fiction and worked to broaden its appeal to the general public.
These efforts to chart new directions for American literature rested on fundamental changes taking place in the publishing industry. To compete with elite periodicals costing twenty-five to thirty-five cents, new magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, and
McClure’s lowered their prices to a dime or fifteen cents and tripled or quadrupled their circulation. Supporting themselves through advertising, these magazines encouraged new trends in fiction while mass-marketing new products. Their editors sought writers who could provide accurate depictions of the “whirlpool of real life” and create a new civic consciousness to heal the class divisions of American society.
Some of these authors have been called regionalists because they captured the distinctive dialect and details of local life in their environs. In The Country of the
Pointed Firs (1896), for example, Sarah Orne Jewett wrote of the New England village life that she knew in South
Berwick, Maine. Others, most notably William Dean
Howells, have been called realists because of their focus on the truthful depiction of the commonplace and the everyday, especially in urban areas. Still others have been categorized as naturalists because their novels and stories deny free will and stress the ways in which life’s outcomes are determined by economic and psychological forces. Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
(1892), a bleak story of an innocent girl’s exploitation and ultimate suicide in an urban slum, is generally considered the first naturalistic American novel. Yet in practice, these categories are imprecise and often overlap. What many of these writers shared was a skepticism about literary conventions and an intense desire to understand the society around them and portray it in words.
The careers of Mark Twain and Theodore Dreiser highlight the changes in the publishing industry and the evolution of new forms of writing. Both authors grew up in the Midwest, outside the East Coast literary establishment. Twain was born near Hannibal, Missouri, in 1835, and Dreiser in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1871. As young men both worked as newspaper reporters and traveled widely. Both learned from direct and sometimes bitter experience about the greed, speculation, and fraud that figured centrally in Gilded Age life.
Of the two, Twain more incessantly sought a massmarket audience. With his drooping mustache, white hair, and white suits, Twain turned himself into a media personality, lecturing from coast to coast, founding his own publishing house, and using door-to-door salesmen to sell his books. The name Mark Twain became his trademark, identifying him to readers as a literary celebrity much as the labels Coca-Cola and Ivory Soap won instant consumer recognition. Although Dreiser possessed neither Twain’s flamboyant personality nor his instinct for salesmanship, he, too, learned to crank out articles.
Drawing on their own experiences, Twain and
Dreiser wrote about the human impact of the wrenching social changes taking place around them: the flow of people to the cities and the relentless scramble for power, wealth, and fame. In the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1884), Twain presents a classic narrative of two runaways, the rebellious Huck and the slave Jim, drifting down the Mississippi in search of freedom. Their physical journey, which contrasts idyllic life on the raft with the tawdry, fraudulent world of small riverfront towns, is a journey of identity that brings with it a deeper understanding of contemporary American society.
Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) also tells of a journey. In this case, the main character, Carrie Meeber, an innocent girl on her way from her Wisconsin farm home to
Chicago, is first seduced by a traveling salesman and then moves in with the married proprietor of a fancy saloon. Driven by her desire for expensive departmentstore clothes and lavish entertainment, Carrie is an opportunist incapable of feeling guilt. She follows her married lover to New York, knowing that he has stolen the receipts from his saloon, abandons him when his money runs out, and pursues her own career in the theater.
Twain and Dreiser broke decisively with the genteel tradition’s emphasis on manners and decorum. Century

Cultures in Conflict
601 magazine readers complained that Huckleberry Finn was coarse and “destitute of a single redeeming quality.”
The publisher of Sister Carrie was so repelled by Dreiser’s novel that he printed only a thousand copies (to fulfill the legal terms of his contract) and then stored them in a warehouse, refusing to promote them.
Growing numbers of scholars and critics similarly challenged the self-serving certitudes of Victorian mores, including assumptions that moral worth and economic standing were closely linked and that the status quo of the 1870s and 1880s represented a social order decreed by God and nature alike. Whereas Henry
George, Lester Ward, and Edward Bellamy elaborated their visions of a cooperative and harmonious society
(see Chapter 18), economist Thorstein Veblen in The
Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) offered a caustic critique of the lifestyles of the new capitalist elite. Raised in a Norwegian farm community in Minnesota, Veblen looked at the captains of industry and their families with a jaundiced eye, mercilessly documenting their “conspicuous consumption” and lamenting the widening economic gap between “those who worked without profit” and “those who profited without working.”
Within the new discipline of sociology, Annie
MacLean exposed the exploitation of department store clerks, Walter Wyckoff uncovered the hand-to-mouth existence of unskilled laborers, and W. E. B. DuBois documented the suffering and hardships faced by blacks in
Philadelphia. The publication of these social scientists’ writings, coupled with the economic depression and seething labor agitation of the 1890s, made it increasingly difficult for turn-of-the-century middle-class Americans to accept the smug, self-satisfied belief in progress and gentility that had been a hallmark of the Victorian outlook.
The challenge to the genteel tradition also found strong support among architects and painters. By the 1890s
Chicago architects William Holabird, John Wellborn
Root, and others had tired of copying European designs.
Breaking with established architects such as Richard
Morris Hunt, the designer of French chateaux for New
York’s Fifth Avenue, these Chicago architects followed the lead of Louis Sullivan, who argued that a building’s form should follow its function. In their view, banks should look like the financial institutions they were, not like Greek temples. Striving to evolve functional
American design standards, the Chicago architects looked for inspiration to the future—to modernism— not to the past.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s “prairie-school” houses, first built in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park in the 1890s, represented a typical modernist break with past styles.
Wright scorned the bulky Victorian house with its large attic and basement. His designs, which featured broad, sheltering roofs and low silhouettes, used interconnecting rooms to create a sense of spaciousness.
The call of modernism, with its rejection of
Victorian refinement, influenced late-nineteenthcentury American painting as well. The watercolors of
Winslow Homer, a magazine illustrator during the Civil
War, revealed nature as brutally tough and unsentimental. In Homer’s grim, elemental seascapes, lone men struggle against massive waves that constantly threaten to overwhelm them. Thomas Eakins’s canvases of swimmers, boxers, and rowers (such as his well-known
Champion Single Sculls , painted in 1871) similarly captured moments of vigorous physical exertion in everyday life.
The revolt by architects and painters against
Victorian standards was symptomatic of a larger shift in middle-class thought. This shift resulted from fundamental economic changes that had spawned a far more complex social environment than that of the past. As
Protestant minister Josiah Strong perceptively observed in 1898, the transition from muscle to mechanical power had “separated, as by an impassable gulf, the simple, homespun, individualistic world of the . . . past, from the complex, closely associated life of the present.” The increasingly evident gap between rural or small-town life—a world of quiet parlors and flickering kerosene lamps—and life in the big, glittering, electrified cities of iron and glass made nineteenth-century Americans acutely aware of differences in upbringing and wealth.
Given the disparities between rich and poor, between rural and urban, and between native-born Americans and recent immigrants, it is no wonder that pious
Victorian platitudes about proper manners and graceful arts seemed out of touch with the new social realities.
Distrusting the idealistic Victorian assumptions about social progress, middle-class journalists, novelists, artists, and politicians nevertheless remained divided over how to replace them. Not until the Progressive Era would social reformers draw on a new expertise in social research and an enlarged conception of the federal government’s regulatory power to break sharply with their
Victorian predecessors’ social outlook.

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C HAPTER 19 Immigration, Urbanization, and Everyday Life, 1860–1900
Although middle-class women figured importantly in the revolt against Victorian refinement, their role was complex and ambiguous. Dissatisfaction with the cult of domesticity did not necessarily lead to open rebellion. Many women, although chafing against the constraints of deference and the assumption that they should limit their activities to the home, remained committed to playing a nurturing and supportive role within the family. In fact, early advocates of a “widened sphere” for women often fused the traditional Victorian ideal of womanhood with a firm commitment to political action.
The career of temperance leader Frances Willard illustrates how the cult of domesticity, with its celebration of special female virtues, could evolve into a broader view of women’s social and political responsibilities. Like many of her contemporaries, Willard believed that women were compassionate and nurturing by nature.
She was also convinced that drinking encouraged thriftlessness and profoundly threatened family life. Resigning as dean of women and professor of English at Northwestern University in 1874, Willard devoted her energies full-time to the temperance cause. Five years later she was elected president of the newly formed Woman’s
Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).
Willard took the traditional belief that women had unique moral virtues and transformed it into a rationale for political action. The domestication of politics, she asserted, would protect the family and improve public morality. Choosing as the union’s badge a bow of white ribbon, symbolizing the purity of the home, she launched a crusade in 1880 to win the franchise for women so that they could vote to outlaw liquor. Willard soon expanded WCTU activities to include welfare work, prison reform, labor arbitration, and public health.
Under her leadership the WCTU, with a membership of nearly 150,000 by 1890, became the nation’s first mass organization of women. Through it, women gained experience as lobbyists, organizers, and lecturers, in the process undercutting the assumption of “separate spheres.”
An expanding network of women’s clubs offered another means by which middle- and upper-class women could hone their skills in civic affairs, public speaking, and intellectual analysis. In the 1870s many well-to-do women met weekly to study topics of mutual interest. These clubwomen soon became involved in social-welfare projects, public library expansion, and tenement reform. By 1892 the General Federation of
Women’s Clubs, an umbrella organization established that year, boasted 495 affiliates and a hundred thousand members.
Another major impetus to an expanded role for women came from a younger generation of college women. Following the precedent set by Oberlin College in 1836, coeducational private colleges and public universities in the Midwest enrolled increasing numbers of women. Columbia, Brown, and Harvard universities in the East admitted women to the affiliated but separate institutions of Barnard (1889), Pembroke (1891), and
Radcliffe (1894), respectively. Nationally, the percentage of colleges admitting women jumped from 30 percent to
71 percent between 1880 and 1900. By the turn of the century, women made up more than one-third of the total college-student population.
Initially, female collegiate education reinforced the prevailing concepts of femininity. The earliest women’s colleges—Mount Holyoke (1837), Vassar
(1865), Wellesley and Smith (1875), and Bryn Mawr
(1884)—were founded to prepare women for marriage, motherhood, and Christian service. But participation in college organizations, athletics, and dramatics enabled female students to learn traditionally “masculine” strategies for gaining power. The generation of women educated at female institutions in the late nineteenth century developed the self-confidence to break with the
Victorian ideal of passive womanhood and to compete on an equal basis with men by displaying the strength, aggressiveness, and intelligence popularly considered male attributes. By 1897 the U.S. commissioner of education noted, “[I]t has become an historical fact that women have made rapid strides, and captured a greater number of honors in proportion to their numbers than men.”
Victorian constraints on women were further loosened at the end of the century when a bicycling vogue swept urban America. Fearful of waning vitality, middleand upper-class Americans explored various ways to improve their vigor. Some used health products such as cod liver oil and sarsaparilla for “weak blood.” Others played basketball, invented in 1891 by a physical education instructor at Springfield College in Massachusetts to keep students in shape during the winter months. But bicycling, which could be done individually or in groups, quickly became the most popular sport for those who wished to combine exercise with recreation.
Bicycles of various designs had been manufactured since the 1870s, but bicycling did not become a national craze until the invention in the 1880s of the so-called safety bicycle, with smaller wheels, ball-bearing axles,

Cultures in Conflict
603 and air-filled tires. By the 1890s over a million Americans owned bicycles.
Bicycling especially appealed to young women who had chafed under the restrictive Victorian attitudes about female exercise, which held that proper young ladies must never sweat and that the female body must be fully covered at all times. Pedaling along in a shirtwaist or “split” skirt, a woman bicyclist made an implicit feminist statement suggesting that she had broken with genteel conventions and wanted to explore new activities beyond the traditional sphere.
Changing attitudes about femininity and women’s proper role also found expression in gradually shifting ideas about marriage. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a suffrage advocate and speaker for women’s rights, asserted that women would make an effective contribution to society only when they won economic independence from men through work outside the home (see Chapter
21). One very tangible indicator of women’s changing relationship to men was the substantial rise in the divorce rate between 1880 and 1900. In 1880 one in every twenty-one marriages ended in divorce. By 1900 the rate had climbed to one in twelve. Women who brought suit for divorce increasingly cited their husbands’ failure to act responsibly and to respect their autonomy.
Accepting such arguments, courts frequently awarded the wife alimony, a monetary settlement payable by the ex-husband to support her and their children.
Women writers generally welcomed the new female commitment to independence and self-sufficiency. In the short stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman, for example, women’s expanding role is implicitly compared to the frontier ideal of freedom. Feminist Kate Chopin pushed the debate to the extreme by having Edna Pontellier, the married heroine of her 1899 novel The Awakening , violate social conventions. First Edna falls in love with another man; then she takes her own life when his ideas about women prove as narrow and traditional as those of her husband.
Despite the efforts of these and other champions of the new woman, attitudes changed slowly. The enlarged conception of women’s role in society exerted its greatest influence on college-educated, middle-class women who had leisure time and could reasonably hope for success in journalism, social work, and nursing. For female immigrant factory workers and for shop girls who worked sixty hours a week to try to make ends meet, however, the ideal remained a more distant goal.
Although many women were seeking more independence and control over their lives, most still viewed the home as their primary responsibility.
While the debate over women’s proper role remained largely confined to the middle class, a very different controversy, over the scope and function of public education, engaged Americans of all socioeconomic levels.
This debate starkly highlighted the class and cultural divisions in late-nineteenth-century society. From the
1870s on, viewing the public schools as an instrument for indoctrinating and controlling the lower ranks of society, middle-class educators and civic leaders campaigned to expand public schooling and bring it under centralized control. Not surprisingly, the reformers’ efforts aroused considerable opposition from ethnic and religious groups whose outlook and interests differed sharply from theirs.
Thanks to the crusade for universal public education started by Horace Mann and other antebellum educational reformers, most states had public school systems by the Civil War, and more than half the nation’s children were receiving some formal education. But most attended school for only three or four years, and few went on to high school.
Concerned that many Americans lacked sufficient knowledge to participate wisely in public affairs or function effectively in the labor force, reformers such as
William Torrey Harris worked to increase the number of years that children spent in school. First as superintendent of the St. Louis public schools in the 1870s and later as the federal commissioner of education, Harris urged teachers to instill in their students a sense of order, decorum, self-discipline, and civic loyalty. Believing that modern industrial society depended on citizens’ conforming to the timetables of the factory and the train, he envisioned the schools as models of punctuality and precise scheduling: “The pupil must have his lessons ready at the appointed time, must rise at the tap of the bell, move to the line, return; in short, go through all the evolutions with equal precision.”
To achieve these goals and to wrest control of the schools from neighborhood leaders and ward politicians, reform-minded educators like Harris elaborated a philosophy of public education stressing punctuality, centralized administration, compulsory-attendance laws, and a tenure system to insulate teachers from political favoritism and parental pressure. By 1900 thirty-one states required school attendance of all children from eight to fourteen years of age.
The steamroller methods used by Harris and likeminded administrators to systematize public education

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C HAPTER 19 Immigration, Urbanization, and Everyday Life, 1860–1900 quickly prompted protests. New York pediatrician
Joseph Mayer Rice, who toured thirty-six cities and interviewed twelve hundred teachers in 1892, scornfully criticized an educational establishment that stressed singsong memorization and prisonlike discipline.
Rice’s biting attack on public education overlooked the real advances in reading and computation made in the previous two decades. Nationally, despite the influx of immigrants, the illiteracy rate for individuals ten years and older dropped from 17 percent in 1880 to 13 percent in 1890, largely because of the expansion of urban educational facilities. American high schools were also coeducational, and girls made up the majority of the students by 1900. But Rice was on target in assailing many teachers’ rigid emphasis on silence, docility, and unquestioning obedience to the rules. When a Chicago school inspector found a thirteen-year-old boy huddled in the basement of a stockyard building and ordered him back to school, the weeping boy blurted out, “[T]hey hits ye if yer don’t learn, and they hits ye if ye whisper, and they hits ye if ye have string in yer pocket, and they hits ye if yer seat squeaks, and they hits ye if ye don’t stan’ up in time, and they hits ye if yer late, and they hits ye if ye ferget the page.”
By the 1880s several different groups found themselves in opposition to centralized urban public school bureaucracies. Although many working-class families valued education, those who depended on their children’s meager wages for survival resisted the attempt to force their sons and daughters to attend school past the elementary grades. Although some immigrant families made great sacrifices to enable their children to get an education, many withdrew their offspring from school as soon as they had learned the rudiments of reading and writing, and sent them to work.
Furthermore, Catholic immigrants objected to the overwhelmingly Protestant orientation of the public schools. Distressed by the use of the King James translation of the Bible and by the schools’ failure to observe saints’ days, Catholics set up separate parochial school

Conclusion
605 systems. In response, Republican politicians, resentful of the Catholic immigrants’ overwhelming preference for the Democratic party, tried unsuccessfully to pass a constitutional amendment cutting off all public aid to church-related schools in 1875. Catholics in turn denounced federal aid to public schools as intended “to suppress Catholic education, gradually extinguish
Catholicity in this country, and to form one homogeneous American people after the New England
Evangelical type.”
At the other end of the social scale, upper-class parents who did not wish to send their children to immigrant-thronged public schools enrolled their daughters in female seminaries such as Emma Willard’s in Troy,
New York, and their sons in private academies and boarding schools like St. Paul’s in Concord, New
Hampshire. The proliferation of private and parochial schools, together with the controversies over compulsory education, school funding, and classroom decorum, reveal the extent to which public education had become entangled in ethnic and class differences. Unlike Germany and Japan, which standardized and centralized their national education systems in the late nineteenth century, the United States, reflecting its social heterogeneity, created a diverse system of locally run public and private institutions that allowed each segment of society to retain some influence over the schools attended by its own children. Amid the disputes, school enrollments dramatically expanded. In 1870 fewer than seventy-two thousand students attended the nation’s
1,026 high schools. By 1900 the number of high schools had jumped to more than 5,000 and the number of students to more than half a million.
C
By the 1890s class conflict was evident in practically every area of city life from mealtime manners to popular entertainment and recreation. As new immigrants flooded the tenements and spilled out onto neighborhood streets, it became impossible for native-born
Americans to ignore their strange religions and social customs. Ethnic differences were compounded by class differences. Often poor and from peasant or workingclass backgrounds, the immigrants took unskilled jobs and worked for subsistence-level wages. Middle- and upper-class Americans often responded by stigmatizing them as nonwhite and racially inferior.
To raise their own standards and to distinguish themselves from these newcomers, native-born
Americans adopted a Victorian code of morality that emphasized good manners, decorum, and self-control.
Although never fully accepted even among the well-todo, these Victorian moral ideals were meant to apply a new standard for civilization and refinement.
These moral standards were further reinforced by an expanded educational system that featured high school and university education as the path to becoming educators, lawyers, doctors, and other professionals.
As defenders of the new Victorian morality, middle- and upper-class women, educated in the expanding college and university system, were expected to become the protectors of the home. Discontented with this new role,
Jane Addams and other social workers developed the settlement house movement and campaigned for legislation to curb the evils of boss politics and urban blight.
Nowhere was the conflict between the social classes more evident than in the controversy over leisure entertainment. Caught up in the material benefits of a prospering industrial society, middle- and upper-class
Americans battled against what they deemed “indecent” lower-class behavior in all its forms, from dancing to ragtime, gambling, and prizefighting to playing baseball on Sunday and visiting bawdy boardwalk sideshows.
Even public parks became arenas of class conflict.
Whereas the elite favored large, impeccably groomed urban parks that would serve as models of orderliness and propriety, working people fought for parks where they could picnic, play ball, drink beer, and escape the stifling heat of tenement apartments.
Although the well-to-do classes often appeared to have the upper hand in these clashes, significant disagreements about moral standards surfaced early within their own ranks. The aged poet Walt Whitman was not alone in his sentiments when he lamented in the essay
“Democratic Vistas” (1881) that “certain portions of the people” were trying to force their cultural standards and moral values on the great mass of the population, who were thereby made to feel “degraded, humiliated, [and] of no account.” Other critics, among them Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, faulted middle-class society for its obsession with polite manners, empty social rituals, and restrictions on the occupations open to women.
By the end of the century, the contest for power between the elite classes and the largely immigrant working class headed toward a partial resolution in a series of compromises that neither side had anticipated.
As Victorian morality eroded, undermined by dissension from within and opposition from without, new standards emerged that blended elements of earlier positions. For example, new rules regulated behavior in the boxing ring and on the baseball field. Still, it was immi-

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C HAPTER 19 Immigration, Urbanization, and Everyday Life, 1860–1900
C H R O N O L O G Y , 1 8 6 0 – 1 9 0 0
1843 Robert M. Hartley founds the New York Association for
Improving the Condition of the Poor.
1851 The American branch of the Young Men’s Christian
Association (YMCA) opens.
1852 Charles Loring Brace Founds the New York Children’s
Aid Society
1855 New York opens its Castle Garden immigrant center.
1865 Vasser College founded.
1869 Boss William Marcy Tweed gains control of New York’s
Tammany Hall political machine.
First intercollegiate football game.
1871 Thomas Eakins, The Champion Single Sculls.
1872 Anthony Comstock founds the New York Society for the
Suppression of Vice and leads a “purity” campaign.
1873 John Wanamaker opens his Philadelphia department store.
1874 Smith College founded.
Frances Willard joins the Woman’s Christian Temperance
Union.
Henry Clay Work, “My Grandfather’s Clock.”
1876 National League of baseball players organized.
1880 William Booth’s followers establish an American branch of the Salvation Army.
1881 Josephine Shaw Lowell founds the New York Charity
Organization Society (COS).
1884 Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn.
Bryn Mawr College founded.
1889 Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr open Hull House.
1891 Stanford University founded.
University of Chicago founded.
Columbia University adds Barnard College as a coordinate institution for women.
Basketball invented at Springfield College in
Massachusetts.
1892 Joseph Mayer Rice writes his expose of public education in Forum magazine.
General Federation of Women’s Clubs organized.
1895 Coney Island amusement parks open in Brooklyn.
1899 Scott Joplin, “Maple Leaf Rag.”
Kate Chopin, The Awakening.
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class .
W. E. B. DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro.
1900 Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie.
1910 Angel Island Immigration Center opens in San Francisco grant heroes who captured the popular imagination.
The elite vision of sport as a vehicle for instilling self-discipline and self-control was transformed into a new commitment to sports as spectacle and entertainment.
Like it or not, sports had become big business and an important part of the new consumerism.
Similar patterns of compromise and change took place in other arenas. Vaudeville houses, attacked by the affluent for their risqué performances, evolved into the nation’s first movie theaters. Ragtime music, with its syncopated rhythms, gave rise to jazz. In short, the raffish, disreputable, raucous, and frequently denounced working-class culture of the late-nineteenth-century city can be seen as the seedbed of twentieth-century mass culture. And everywhere popular culture became increasingly dominated by commercial interests that capitalized on the disposable income created by the nation’s explosive industrial growth and encouraged the popular fondness for material goods, leisure, sports, and other entertainments.
F
F
R
EADINGS
William L. Barney, ed., A Companion to 19 th -Century
America (2001). A useful survey of urbanization, ethnicity, class difference, and other topics in the late nineteenth century.
Martin J. Burke, The Conundrum of Class: Public Discourse on the Social Order in America (1995). A pioneering study into the ways in which nineteenth-century Americans tried to understand class difference.
Ruth H. Crocker , Social Work and Social Order: The
Settlement Movement in Two Industrial Cities, 1889–1930
(1992). An important, balanced assessment of the settlement house movement.
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great
West (1991). An innovative study of the link between urban growth and regional economic prosperity in the
Midwest.

For Further References
607
Elliot Gorn and Warren Goldstein , A Brief History of
American Sports (1993). A skillful analysis of the effect of urbanization, industrialization, and commercialization on American sports.
Hadassa Kosak, Cultures of Opposition: Jewish Immigrant
Workers, New York City, 1881–1905 (2000). A careful examination of the tensions within an ethnic community and the ways in which a distinctive working-class political culture emerged on New York’s Lower East Side.
Martin Melosi, ed., Pollution and Reform in American
Cities, 1870–1930 (1980). A pioneering examination of the environmental impact of U.S. industrial and urban growth.
Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The
Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model
Town of Pullman (1995). An innovative study of the ways in which the nineteenth-century responses to urban disorders shaped contemporary perceptions about city life.
Peter Stearns, Schools and Students in Industrial Society:
Japan and the West, 1870–1940 (1998). Stearns’s comparative examination of high school education in Europe, the United States, and Japan highlights the distinctive features of American education.
Virginia Yans-McLaughlin and Marjorie Lightman, Ellis
Island and the Peopling of America (1997). A broad overview of the process of migration, with useful documents.
Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1879–1920 (1990)
A pioneering exploration of corporate capitalism’s effect on the creation of a consumer culture.
EBSITES
The American Variety Stage: Vaudeville and Popular
Entertainment, 1870–1920 http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/vshtml/vshome.html
Contains theater playbills and programs and sound recordings.
America at Work, School, and Leisure: Motion Pictures from 1894–1915 http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/awlhtml/awlhome.html
A Library of Congress collection that contains video clips.
Forms of Variety Theater http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/vshtml/vsforms.html#ms
Covers vaudeville, variety, and minstrel shows and contains playbills, programs, and sound recordings.
Mark Twain in His Times http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/index2.html
By Stephen Railton at the University of Virginia, this site uses texts, images, and interactive exhibits to examine how “Mark Twain” and his works were created, marketed, and performed.
Selected Images of Ellis Island and Immigration, ca.
1880–1920 http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/print/070_immi.html
From the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.
For additional works please consult the bibliography at the end of the book.
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